Friday, 17 August 2012

Accidental Death

In the
heat of the forenoon, the air over the quarry was hazy with dust and the bare
rock was painfully bright in the sun.

Jamilah stepped carefully down the zig-zag metal
stairs, holding on to the thin railing and trying not to get her stiletto heels
caught in the narrow rungs. The dust mixed in the sweat on her skin and left
tracks down her face, and she wished she could have dressed in something more
appropriate than a business suit. But she was an executive, a representative of
her company, and she had to look the part.

At the bottom of the stairs, a drill
operator in an orange high-visibility jacket silently handed her a yellow hard
hat. She looked it over before putting it on, noting the scuff marks and
scratches, and a gash near the crown that must have almost penetrated all the
way through the hard plastic. The operator stared back at her, his eyes daring
her to make an issue of the quality of the headgear.

They all hated her, of course. They would,
at this time of all times. She was the face of the company, and the one to
blame for everything that had happened.

Well, screw them. She had enough problems
to deal with already, and she wouldn’t let some passive-aggressive drill jockey
with a tenth of her education put her off her stride.

The heat down here was incredible. The quarry,
a huge semicircle, pale yellow stone honeycombed with tunnels, seemed to focus
the entire fire of the sun to the precise spot where she stood. The floor of
the quarry was littered with pieces of stone, from boulders the size of houses
to pebbles smaller than her little fingernail. When she moved, they skittered
away from her feet as though alive.

She thought about asking the lout in the
orange jacket where the manager’s office was, but she was damned if she’d be
obliged to him for anything, even if it were something as small as that. Giving
the hard hat a shake, to rid it of any grit that might be stuck in the lining,
she clapped it on her hair and stalked off across the floor of the quarry.

Here and there, among the rocks, she saw
piles of miniphant dung, and over on one side the long sheds with corrugated
roofs that had to be their stables. A trio of crude haystacks towered over the
sheds, and were fenced off with posts and barbed wire. Jamilah’s lips tightened
when she saw the wire; the contract for leasing the miniphants specifically
prohibited that kind of thing.

She was still looking at the stacks when
there was a soft heavy tread behind her, and something snorted deeply, blowing
a gust of air at her. Slowly, not making any startling movements, she turned.

The miniphant was pulling along a line of
trolleys of crushed ore, a towing harness around its barrel-shaped body. Its
short trunk was extended in her direction, breathing in her unfamiliar smell,
its large ears held out alertly. She saw the tattooed identification number on
its ear, 304x31. It was a 304 series, meaning it must be an old animal,
something borne out by the cracks in its toenails and the deep wrinkles in its
grey-brown skin. She noticed a small wound in its near haunch, a half-healed
double laceration, and wondered how it had managed to hurt itself.

“It’s all right,” she said softly. “Carry
on with your work.” The miniphant eyed her for a moment more, and then lumbered
past with its train of trolleys. It was big for a miniphant, almost as tall as
she was, another confirmation of its age. The newer series ‘phants were equally
strong, but tended to be much smaller. She’d certainly have all the details of
its personal history in her files. They contained the data of every animal
leased to this particular mining company, now and in the past.

Turning to see if she could find any other
‘phants, she finally located the manager’s office. It was a prefab construction
on a metal platform, partially built into a niche in the cliff. A stocky figure
stood outside, arms folded across its chest, watching her. When the man saw
that she had noticed him, he turned and walked back into the office.

She fought down the spasm of irritation.
She couldn’t afford to let emotion affect her judgement. She wiped her face on
her handkerchief, leaving dirty grey streaks on the white linen, and walked off
across the quarry floor towards the office.

*********************************

The
manager was a short, thickset man with a neck as broad as his head. From under
his hard hat, a mass of greying hair tumbled down to his collar. His grey-green
eyes were bloodshot and peered suspiciously at Jamilah while his hand
reflexively stroked his thick grey moustache. The nameplate on his desk read
François Dubois.

Fifty
six years old, the company’s files had told her. Born in Quebec, mining engineer, has a
reputation for being difficult to get along with. No family. No known personal
weaknesses. Known opponent of the ‘phant programme. She had sighed when
she’d read it. It seemed that all the mining engineers she had ever known were
opponents of the miniphant programme.

“Jamilah Torabinejad?” He looked down at
her identification as if it were a shoddy forgery. “If you don’t mind me saying
so, I didn’t expect someone as young as you.”

“Or a woman,” Jamilah said. She hefted her
briefcase on to the table. “We’d better be completely open with each other, Mr Dubois.
You didn’t expect a woman either, did you?”

Dubois shrugged his muscular shoulders. “As
you say. I didn’t expect your company to send a young woman on a matter of this
importance. It frankly worries me. I wonder if your employers are really taking
this matter as seriously as they should.”

“As you saw in my identification papers, I
am the chief investigator for the company, so obviously they are taking it as
seriously as they possibly can.” Jamilah smiled without humour. “Could you
please let me know the precise circumstances under which this – incident – occurred?”

“I have to be on my rounds,” Dubois said.
“I can’t sit here talking. Can we talk as we go along?”

Jamilah kept her expression neutral. It was
just petty harassment, they both knew, and in her business skirt and high heels
she would have a hard time following him around. But she needed his cooperation,
so she would put up with it – for now.

Outside, the heat seemed to have doubled,
so intense that she felt as though her skin would blister. Dubois didn’t seem
to notice it. “Come this way,” he said over his shoulder, and strode up a
narrow ramp cut in the side of the quarry. There was no handrail or guard of
any kind, and her stiletto heels scraped and slithered on the stone,
threatening to send her over the edge at every step. Finally, she took them
off, tiptoeing to minimise the contact of her feet with the baking rock
surface. Dubois didn’t seem to notice.

“He was one of my best men,” he said. “An
engineering supervisor. Hernandez, his name was, but I’m sure you know all that
already.”

“Jaime Hernandez, yes.” Jamilah nodded at
the man’s broad back. They had already climbed part way up the side of the
quarry, and from here she could truly appreciate how large it was. She felt as
though they were ants crawling along the side of a gigantic bowl. “It was in
the report.”

“Yeah, well. Anyway, we found him early yesterday
morning, over inside the miniphant stables. He’d been dead for some hours by
then.”

“You claim the miniphants killed him?”

“Claim?”
Dubois stopped long enough to glare at her over his shoulder. “The ground
around him was all trodden around with ‘phant prints, and his head and chest
had been stove in. Who else but a ‘phant could have done it, you tell me?”

“What was he doing in the miniphant
stables?”

“It was part of his duties, to check on
stable security. I suppose he was on his rounds at night and those damned
things killed him. I always said they’d do something like this one day, and...”

Jamilah interrupted him. “Was it something
he did regularly, his rounds at night?” They had turned off the ramp onto a
shelf cut deep into the side of the cliff, and she paused to put on her shoes.
The soles of her feet were burning unpleasantly. “Did he do them each night at
the same time?”

Dubois shrugged. “I delegate it to my staff
to arrange their schedules. As long as the work gets done, that’s the important
thing.” They had reached a flat platform where a pair of miniphants was working
a treadmill which controlled a roller set with toothed wheels cutting into the
wall of the cliff.A brace of engineers
stood supervising.

“I hate the damned things,” Dubois said,
jerking his head at the miniphants. “I know it’s your company which produced
and patented the design, but I still hate them.”

“What would you rather that we do?” Jamilah
asked. “You know we can’t go back to the Machine Age, not anymore, now that the
fossil fuels have run out. Would you rather have human slave gangs do the
work?”

“Of course they aren’t.” Jamilah felt
bewildered momentarily. Why was she even having this conversation with this
bigot? “Natural animals aren’t perfectly fitted for specific jobs, and besides
they’re covered by animal rights laws. With miniphants and other gengineered
creatures, we tailor them for the work they have to do, and they’re counted as
biomachines, not animals, so the laws are a bit different.”

“Meaning your people can make money from
them. It still doesn’t mean I have to like them.”

“Your employers are also making money from
them, sir.” Jamilah waited while Dubois walked over and talked to the
supervisors. The miniphants kept going on the treadmill, and the wheels ground
into the cliff, chewing the stone away and spitting out chips. She winced at
the thought of having to do this kind of work all day, every day. At least the
miniphants were rotated regularly to other jobs. These would probably be
pulling ploughs on a farm in three months’ time.

“Let’s get back to the point,” she said
when Dubois returned. “Your man Hernandez was found dead early yesterday morning,
and you say he may have been on his rounds at night. Was there anyone who saw
him?”

“How does it matter, whether someone saw
him or not? The facts are clear, aren’t they?”

“To you they may be, but they aren’t to me.
And in this case, what I say goes.”

Dubois stopped and stared at her. “Look
here, lady,” he began, “let me explain something. I don’t have the time to mess
around. We have a death here, caused by your miniphants. Your company
guarantees to indemnify us against damage caused by miniphants. I don’t see
what your problem is, really. You just have to check over the facts and submit
your report, and that’s it.”

“That might be your understanding of the situation, Mr Dubois.” Jamilah suddenly
felt a bubble of laughter rising inside her, and pushed it down. “But that’s
not my job description. I’m here to
make a proper investigation, and if you check out the terms of the lease –
which, as you say, indemnifies you against damage caused by the ‘phants –
you’ll see that the terms also specifies that a thorough investigation must be
conducted first, and that unless you provide your entire cooperation, we’re
within our rights to refuse payment...and also to terminate the agreement. In
other words, work with me, or you may lose even these miniphants you claim to
despise.” She paused. “That reminds me, I saw that you’ve put up barbed wire
around the haystacks. That’s a violation of the lease terms, because the
miniphants can get hurt from that wire. I’ll have a look around to see whether
I find any other violations.”

Dubois’ lips were compressed in a thin
white line. “Go down to the office,” he said, “and wait. I’ll send someone to
talk to you. She knows more about the Hernandez affair than I do.”

The young Vietnamese woman sitting opposite
her in the office nodded. “I’ve heard that they’re the safest gengineered
creatures, for their size,” she said. “I’ve never felt scared around one.”

She had introduced herself as Nguyen
Phuong, and said she was an engineer on the site. She’d worked with Hernandez,
as part of his team, she said. It was she who had discovered his corpse.

“They aren’t supposed to be capable of
aggression against humans,” Jamilah agreed. “Can you show me where he was
found?”

“Yes, come along.” Phuong waited while
Jamilah put on her shoes. She was so short that she barely came up to the other
woman’s shoulder, but was pretty and had wiry strength in her limbs. “I found
him between Stable Blocks A and B,” she said.

“Between the blocks?” Jamilah peered at
her. “The manager said he’d been found inside the stables, not between blocks.”

Phuong raised her hands, palms up. “Dubois,
he doesn’t really run the place hands-on, you know? He leaves all the
day-to-day work to everyone else. Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this? But he
didn’t even bother to come check the spot where Hernandez was killed.”

Jamilah looked up at the top of the quarry.
Up there, the banks of solar panels glittered, sucking up the sun to turn its
power to electricity. To one side of the panels, something else glittered, a
tiny point of light, as of sun reflected off binocular lenses.Jamilah nodded to herself. Someone up there
was watching them.

“Don’t worry about what you tell me,” she
said to the Vietnamese girl. “I won’t get you in trouble over it. But you said
you found him. How did that happen?”

“I was on the early shift yesterday,
starting at three in the morning.” Phuong pointed across the quarry floor. “My
quarters are over there, on the other side of that rock pile. I came to the
stables to pick out the miniphants for the shift. The roster said numbers
thirty-one, forty, ninety-two and a hundred and twenty were to go with me.”

Jamilah nodded. “I saw thirty-one a while
ago. You found them all in place?”

“Yeah, they are all from Block B, and they
were all in their stalls. All the ‘phants I saw were in their stalls.” She
hesitated. “Well, I ordered them out and checked them on the duty list – it’s
kept in the stable block – and I was walking with them towards Shaft Nine, that’s
where they’re posted. Then, while I was passing the space between the stable
blocks...”

“Wait,” said Jamilah. “You said it was
three in the morning. Is it dark at that time?”

“Yes, of course, it’s night, but the quarry
is lit by floods. Standard safety regulations.” Phuong pointed. “There are the
stable blocks, all four of them, twenty stalls per block.”

“According to my records, you have only
fifty-eight miniphants here.”

“That’s right. Block D is vacant, and
locked up.” Phuong fell silent as a small group of men walked past,
accompanying a trolley loaded with long heavy oxygen cylinders and hauled by a
miniphant. The animal lifted its trunk and blew a friendly snort at her, but
the men stared them up and down with a coolly hostile expression on their
faces.

“Not people who like you?” Jamilah asked
when the group had passed out of earshot.

Phuong shook her head. “They don’t like
women on the job, especially women who are better qualified and in authority
positions. For them, women are good for one thing, and one thing only.” A note
of bitterness had crept into her voice. “They resent every order they have to
take from us.”

“Are there other women here?”

“Not at the moment. I’m the only one.”
Phuong pointed again. “Look here, this is Block B, where my ‘phants were. And
this is A. I was passing by here, along this path, when I happened to look into
the space between them, and I saw a body.”

“Did you see at once that it was
Hernandez?”

“No, how could I? It was dark between the
blocks. The floods don’t penetrate too far in there. And, besides, he was so
battered about that I couldn’t have recognised him even if I could have seen
him clearly.”

“I suppose there isn’t any doubt that it was Hernandez?”

“No, we found identity papers on him, and I
believe that they conducted a retinal scan down in town, later.”

“Just to satisfy my curiosity, you
understand, can you tell me just what made you look into that space in the
first place? Were the miniphants acting any different?”

Phuong shrugged. “Not that I could tell.
They seemed pretty much as usual. I can’t give any particular reason why I
looked in there. I just did.”

“And what did you do then?”

“I ordered the miniphants to wait and went
closer to have a better look. I didn’t go right into the space between the
blocks, where it was dark, just far enough that I could tell that whoever it
was had to be dead. Then I returned the ‘phants to the stable block and called
for help.”

“Called for help from whom, the stable
block attendants?”

Phuong stared at her. “What stable block attendants?”

“I see,” Jamilah said, mentally adding up
another violation to the list. “You called whom, then? The manager?”

“Not him. He doesn’t live on site. I called
the assistant manager, D’Souza. He was sleeping, and took a while to get up. By
the time we came back, with some other men, it was almost dawn, but the body
was still there...in exactly the same position.”

“And you found miniphant prints around the
body?”

“All around the body, and on it. ‘Phant
dung, too. D’Souza took photographs, and then we sent the body down to the
morgue in town.”

“Where is this D’Souza now?”

“He must be on duty on the rock face
somewhere. I don’t know for sure. I’m not on his team. I could find out,
though.”

“All right, I’ll talk to him later.”
Jamilah paused. “All the miniphants were in their stalls, locked in securely, I
take it?”

“All of them were in their stalls, yes.”
Phuong hesitated again. “Actually...”

“You promise I won’t get into trouble over
telling you this?” Phuong looked around quickly. “The ‘phants are never locked
in at night,” she said. “They know their stalls and they can be trusted to stay
in them, but it’s considered too much trouble to lock them in. Every shift,
some of them are taken out and some come back from work, and there are no
attendants so it would be a major problem to get the stable blocks unlocked and
relocked. The doors are closed and latched, but that’s about it.”

“Huh. And miniphants can operate a latch
without trouble, with their trunks. You know that, don’t you?”

Phuong said nothing. Jamilah walked into
the space between the two stable blocks. It was rather larger than she had
imagined, and the rock splashed with the rusty stain of dried blood. She could
still make out the prints of miniphant feet, like irregular discs.

“I was wondering how they managed to get to
him between the stable blocks,” she said. “But if they weren’t locked in,
well...” She poked at a small pile of debris, pieces of wooden planks, a heavy
iron crowbar, metal nails and scraps of paper. “What’s this?”

Jamilah curiously examined one of the
pieces of wood. It was a heavy slab of wooden plank, with a couple of long
rusty nails sticking out of one side. “I wonder where this came from,” she
said, throwing it down, and picked up one of the crumpled scraps of paper. It
seemed to be a list of paired miniphant numbers, and was soaked in dried blood.
“Let’s have a look inside the stables.”

**********************************

“Tell me about Hernandez,” Jamilah said.

The assistant manager, D’Souza, eyed her
mistrustfully. He was balding, in late middle age, and was probably aware that
he had advanced, professionally speaking, as far as he was ever going to go.
“What do you want to know about him? His job and so on?”

“I know the basic career details,” Jamilah
said. “I want to know the other stuff; what he was like personally, what his
interests were, what made him tick. Was he popular with the other men?”

“As far as I know.” D’Souza’s face was
closed like a fist. “I don’t really associate too much with his sort.
They’re...not my kind of people.”

“I see.” Jamilah looked around. They were
in a deep hollow cut into the quarry face. A miniphant treaded the power plate
of an ore crusher, which pounded monotonously away, battering the stone down to
chips. “And are there men here who would know more about him?”

“Sure.” D’Souza glanced at Phuong, who was
waiting discreetly out of earshot. “I’ll have her take you to the off-duty
men’s mess. You can talk to them yourself.”

“It’s a lonely place here, isn’t it?”
Jamilah said, changing tack. Getting information from this man was like pulling
teeth. “Far from town, no facilities for amusement that I can see. What do you
people do for relaxation?”

“I, you mean? I have my books, my
meditation music.”

“Uh, not just you, sir. I meant the other
men.”

D’Souza shrugged. “I imagine the men do
what they’d do anywhere in similar circumstances. Drink a lot, gamble over
anything that catches their fancy. Does it matter?”

“It might. I don’t know.” D’Souza was
beginning to display distinct signs of impatience, and Jamilah decided to quit
while she was ahead. “Thanks for the help, Mr D’Souza.”

“Yes, just give me a minute, and I’ll tell
Ms Nguyen where to take you.” D’Souza had bent down to fiddle with the
mechanism of the ore crusher. Grateful of the rest, the miniphant stopped its
treading, and Jamilah stroked its flank gently. The miniphant watched her
keenly out of its small eyes. Jamilah’s fingers found a knot in the skin, a
pair of parallel scars, left by wounds not long healed. She frowned,
remembering the wounds she had seen on the other miniphant earlier.

“That’s done,” D’Souza announced. He called
Phuong over and spoke to her briefly. “Ms Nguyen will take you to the men’s
mess and let you talk to them,” he told Jamilah when he had finished. “But you
understand that the men here may not exactly be cordial or helpful?”

“Thank you,” Jamilah said with a tight
smile. “I’ve met a few and I know what you’re talking about.”

They had walked halfway down the ramp
leading from the work area when D’Souza called to Jamilah. “Ms Torabinejad,” he
called. “Wait!”

She turned to see him hurrying down to her.
Coming up to her, he leaned close to murmur in her ear.

“Jaime Hernandez was one of the vilest
bastards I’ve ever known,” he said.

***********************************

“You may be interested to hear that I’ve completed my investigations,”
Jamilah announced.

It was evening. The shadows cast by the
setting sun lay long and purple across the quarry, and the air was much cooler.
The noise of the machinery went on, but less loudly, as if even pistons and
gears were getting ready to turn in for the night.

Sitting opposite her in the cramped office,
Dubois stared at her without changing expression. “”And?” he asked at length.
“When does your company pay the indemnity?”

“It doesn’t.” Jamilah let the words drop
into a pool of silence. She watched the angry flush rising slowly in Dubois’
face and raised a hand. “Listen to me,” she said.

“My company leases these miniphants to
yours under strict conditions. While I was conducting my investigations, I
found just about each and every one of those conditions violated. Those
violations alone would be grounds for terminating the contract and pulling our
animals out of here. But that’s not the reason I’m going to recommend against
paying the indemnity.”

“If you’ll listen,” Jamilah said quietly,
“I’ll tell you what I found.

“The first thing is that the dead man
wasn’t exactly a nice person. From all accounts, he was sadistic, not only to
his fellow workers but to the miniphants as well. And did you know he was a
compulsive gambler?”

“What does that have to do with...”

“Please let me finish. Apparently, Mr
Hernandez hadn’t much luck with cards. I’ve talked to your men, and they said
he’d lost big, and then lost again. In the end, he tried cheating, and was
caught, and after that the others stopped playing cards with him altogether,
but he couldn’t control his gambling streak. So he thought up another game, one
in which he apparently did rather better.”

“Oh?” Dubois looked bored. He tilted his
chair back against the wall, and crossed his legs. “What?”

“Betting on miniphant fights.”

“What!”
Dubois’ chair slammed back down on the floor. “What the hell are you telling
me?”

“I knew something strange was going on
already. On at least two of your ‘phants, I saw strange wounds, parallel
lacerations. Not deep, but they would’ve hurt like hell when new. I couldn’t
imagine what might have inflicted them, at first.

“But then, between your stable blocks,
where the body was found, I discovered something strange. A piece of wooden
plank, through which two nails had been driven so that the end protruded from
the other side. A blow from that would have produced almost exactly the wound
I’d seen on those two ‘phants.”

“A wound means nothing.”

“No? If I ask you to parade all the fifty-eight
miniphants you have, do you want to bet I won’t find the same wounds on all or
at least most of them? Do you want to try it?”

Dubois said nothing. His bloodshot eyes
glared at Jamilah, and turned away.

“That’s not all. I also found a piece of
paper with miniphant numbers there, arranged in pairs. Care to explain to me
what that might be except a match-up of fights?

“It was easy to organise, of course.
‘Phants are genetically programmed and trained to obey humans, and there wasn’t
even a lock on the stable block doors. It would have been so easy to bring them
pair by pair into that space between the blocks, where the floodlights don’t
reach well. And since the manager doesn’t even live on the site and is known to
have a completely hands-off administrative style – so long as nothing goes
wrong enough to attract official attention, of course – they hadn’t anyone in
authority to fear.

“It must have been difficult to goad the
miniphants to fight, even with that weapon. They are from elephant stock, of
course, but they’re sterile and bred for mildness of temperament. But push them
far enough, beat them till they’re in a frenzy, and they’ll fight. That’s what
your Hernandez did, and that’s how he got killed.”

“I assume you mean those beasts trampled
him during the fight? But wouldn’t there be witnesses?”

“Mr Dubois. I told you this man was a cheat. He wouldn’t bet on anything unless
he had a fair idea in advance of the outcome, of course.” Jamilah stood up and
collected her briefcase.

“He was playing off the next night’s
contestants against each other,” she said, “to see which the better fighter was,
so he knew the one on which to place his money. That’s why there were no
witnesses.”

She turned at the doorway of the office and
pointed at Dubois. “If I were you, I’d forget about the indemnity altogether
and start fulfilling the terms of the contract. I’ll be back in a month, and if
things aren’t better, I’m pulling the miniphants.”

She closed the door quietly behind her,
leaving Dubois sitting there and waiting for it to slam.

*******************************

“I kind of thought I’d find you waiting for me,” Jamilah said.

Phuong smiled slightly. “It all went well,
I hope?”

“Well, yes, in the sense that Dubois won’t
get any indemnity and that the miniphants will be looked after properly.”
Jamilah took off the battered hard hat and hung it on a hook at the foot of the
steps. The last of the afternoon light lay on the quarry floor, while the upper
parts of the cliff were still bathed in ruddy sunlight. Jamilah turned towards
the metal stairs, and then, almost casually, turned towards Phuong.

“Of course,” she said, “I had to act out a
lie. I had to pretend the miniphants killed him accidentally, during the fight.
But of course he wasn’t killed accidentally, he was quite deliberately
murdered. And he wasn’t killed by a miniphant. He was killed by you.”

Phuong’s face froze for a long moment. “Why
do you say that?” she asked at last, her voice too casual.

“Before I tell you that,” Jamilah said,
“answer this question. Why?”

Phuong was silent so long that Jamilah
thought she wouldn’t speak. “He raped me,” she said at last. “He threatened me
with a knife, and raped me, and made sure to tell me that he’d rape me again,
whenever he wanted. Of course,” she added, “I have no proof of this. None
whatsoever.”

“I believe you,” Jamilah told her. “From
what I’ve heard of him, I’d have believed it anyway. But the proof was when you
made no attempt to deny it.”

Phuong shrugged. “I didn’t have a choice. I
had no proof; it was his word against mine, and in this line of work, they hate
women anyway. If I’d accused him, who do you think would’ve suffered, he or I?”

“Yeah. I get that. I completely understand
you there.”

“Why do you think it was I?”

“I’ve seen you with the miniphant,” Jamilah
said. “I saw how it reacted to you. They only do it with people they really like,
and people miniphants actually like
are very rare on the ground. When they find someone like that, they obey
without question.

“Also, you were the only really vulnerable
person here. The men obviously club together and wouldn’t have to kill
Hernandez; a beating at the most would’ve sufficed. But not one of them would
have lifted a finger to help you.

“Besides, I let Dubois believe the ‘phants
trampled Hernandez to death during the fight, but that’s ridiculous, of course.
Miniphants are conditioned not to hurt a human, even by accident, whatever
happens. If Hernandez had fallen under them while they were fighting, they’d
have stopped their combat instantly. They’d rather do anything at all,
literally, than allow a human to come to harm.

“So this is what I figure happened. You
went along to the miniphant stables, and Hernandez was there waiting. I think
you knew he’d be there, probably because he’d told you so in order to make you
tremble, and you took a weapon with you. I’m pretty certain what the weapon
was, too. I found it there, didn’t I? A crowbar. Like everything else, it was
covered in his blood, so it wasn’t especially noticeable.

“So when he came to you, you went with him
into that space where he held the miniphant fights, and then you killed him by
hitting him over the head with the crowbar. He wasn’t expecting it, and you’re
strong. I’ve seen the muscles in your arms.

“After that, it was simple, really. You
called the miniphants, and made them walk over him and jump on him a couple of
times, so the crowbar marks were obliterated. Without a lock, and with no
attendants, it was easy. Also, he was dead already, so the miniphants wouldn’t
refuse. After that you just stabled the miniphants, went back to your quarters,
waited a few hours, and when your next shift was due you ‘discovered’ his body
precisely as you described. No, don’t say anything. I know that’s what
happened, and you know that’s what happened, but I don’t want to hear it. OK?”

“OK,” Phuong nodded. “I won’t say
anything.”

“I’m not going to get you in trouble.”
Jamilah touched the younger woman on the shoulder. “Besides, I’m only a company
investigator, and not a policewoman. Only the miniphants are my business, not
people. All right, I’ll be going. I hope and expect you’ll be all right now.”

No comments:

Post a Comment

Full comment moderation is enabled on this site, which means that your comment will only be visible after the blog administrator (in other words, yours truly) approves it. The purpose of this is not to censor dissenting viewpoints; in fact, such viewpoints are welcome, though it may lead to challenges to provide sources and/or acerbic replies (I do not tolerate stupidity).

The purpose of this moderation is to eliminate spam, of which this blog attracts an inordinate amount. Spammers, be warned: it takes me less time to delete your garbage than it takes for you to post it.